JOH1 
REED 

STEFFENS 


JOHN  REED 


INCOLN  STEFFENS 
an  Introduction 
by  CLARENCE  DARROW 


Printed  bj>  WILL  RANSOM^ 
THEWALDEN  BOOK  SHOP 
jojTjymoutb  Court,  CHICAGO 


- 


_ 


\vi 


INTRODUCTION 


5  HIS1  little  sketch  of  the  tragedy 
of  Jack  Reed's  life  and  death 
is  taken  from  the  "Freeman." 
Ever  since  IfirSt  read  it,  I  have 
felt  that  it  should  be  put  into  some  perma 
nent  form.  Its  simplicity,  its  Strength,  and 
its  understanding  make  a  profound  appeal 
to  all  idealists.  It  is  a  plain  Story  of  one  out 
of  the  long  liSt  of  tragedies  growing  out  of 
the  great  war  which  brought  so  many  hopes 
and  fears,  loves  and  hates,  dreams  and  dis 
appointments  in  its  wake.  It  is  a  sketch  of 
one  out  of  the  infinitely  longer  line  of  the 
tragedies  that  befall  the  lovers  of  mankind. 
Lincoln  Steffens  is  a  dreamer  and  ideal- 
iSt  who  feels  and  understands.  He  has  the 
power  of  expressing  his  emotions  and  insight, 
which  few  men  ever  had.  Jack  Reed  was 


••"•  fff  «'  >  f\  f""*  £***' 

M5QS55 


one  of  the  rarest  and  moff  devoted  men  'who 
ever  laid  down  his  life  for  a  noble  dream. 
I  am  sure  that  this  Story  of  the  power  and 
pathos,  the  beauty  and  tragedy  that  go  'with 
devoted  idealism,  'will  have  a  permanent 
place  in  the  literature  of  the  'world. 

Clarence  Darrow 
Christmas,  1921 


JOHN  REED 

Under  the  Kremlin 


>OHN  REED,  American 
poet,  died,  a  communist, 
in  Moscow,  the  capital 
of  the  future  State,  of  the 
disease  of  the  revolu 
tionary  present ;  typhus :  he  was  bitten 
by  a  sick  louse,  a  doomed  parasite. 

Jack  could  have  made  a  song  of  that, 
a  laughing  song,  in  the  days  when  he 
sang  and  laughed.  He  was  a  joyous 
spirit  then;  I  tried  to  keep  him  glad. 
His  father  asked  me  to.  Jack's  father  was 
my  friend,  and  a  brilliant  man  he  was;  a 
wit.  The  leading  spirit  of  the  leading 
club  of  Portland,  Oregon,  he  played 
himself,  as  he  wished  his  boy  to  play,  till 
he  was  bitten,  as  the  boy  was,  by  those 
same  deadly,  dying  things. 


Francis  J.  Heney  came  to  Oregon, 
prosecuting  timber  frauds,  seeking  with 
William  J.  Burns  for  the  proofs  of  the 
process  by  which  our  forests  fell  into 
private  hands.  The  evidence  reached  up 
among  the  commanding  men  of  Ore* 
gon,  and  they  controlled,  among  other 
things,  the  machinery  of  the  law.  Their 
U.  S.  Marshal  picked  the  juries.  Heney 
asked  Charles  J.  Reed — Jack's  father — 
to  be  U.  S.  Marshal  and  so  see  that  the 
panels  were  free  and  fair.  Reed  laughed. 
He  guessed  what  it  meant  to  him,  but 
he  took  the  job;  and  he  did  the  job. 
There  were  convictions  and  there  were 
hates.  Reed's  club  hated  Reed,  who  faced 
the  hate  and  bit  it  with  his  wit.  He  had 
a  tongue,  as  Jack  had.  It  is  a  story  of 
breed  I  'm  telling. 

One  day,  several  years  after  the  tim 
ber-fraud  scandal,  ex-U.  S.  Marshal  Reed 
invited  me  to  his  club.  He  led  me  into 


the  main  dining-room  up  to  the  centre 
table  where  "the  crowd"  lunched.  It 
was  the  noon-hour;  most  of  the  crowd 
were  there. 

*9 

"There  they  are,"  said  Reed  to  me, 
but  for  them  to  hear.  "  That 's  the  crowd 
that  got  the  timber  and  tried  to  get  me. 
And  there,  at  the  head  of  the  table,  that 
vacant  chair,  that's  my  place.  That's 
where  I  sat.  That's  where  I  stood  them 
off,  for  fun  for  years,  and  then  for  months 
in  deadly  earnest;  but  gaily,  always  gaily. 
I  haven't  sat  in  that  place  since  the  day 
I  rose  and  left  it,  saying  I  'd  never  come 
back  to  it  and  saying  that  I  would  like 
to  see  which  one  of  them  would  have 
the  nerve  to  think  that  he  could  take  and 
hold  and  fill  my  place.  I  have  heard,  and 
I  am  glad  to  see,  that  it  is  vacant  yet,  my 
vacant  chair." 

That  was  Jack  Reed's  father:  tall, 
handsome,  audacious  and  a  wit;  a  gay 

9 


and,  later,  a  bitten,  bitter  wit.  He  told 
me  about  his  boy  at  Harvard  and  he 
asked  me  "to  look  out  for  Jack"  when 
he  came  out  of  college  into  life  in  New 
York. 

"He  is  a  gay  spirit,"  the  father  said, 
"  a  joyous  thing.  Keep  him  so.  He  is  a 
poet,  I  think;  keep  him  singing.  Let 
him  see  everything,  but  don't — don't 
let  him  get  like  me." 

I  couldn't.  I  tried,  and  not  for  his 
father's  sake  only.  When  John  Reed 
came,  big  and  growing,  handsome  out 
side  and  beautiful  inside,  when  that  boy 
came  down  from  Cambridge  to  New 
York,  it  seemed  to  me  that  I  had  never 
seen  anything  so  near  to  pure  joy.  No 
ray  of  sunshine,  no  drop  of  foam,  no 
young  animal,  bird  or  fish,  and  no  star, 
was  as  happy  as  that  boy  was.  If  only 
we  could  keep  him  so,  we  might  have 
a  poet  at  last  who  would  see  and  sing 

10 


nothing  but  joy.  Convictions  were  what 
I  was  afraid  of.  I  tried  to  steer  him  away 
from  convictions,  that  he  might  play; 
that  he  might  play  with  life ;  and  see  it 
all,  love  it  all,  live  it  all ;  tell  it  all ;  that 
he  might  be  it  all ;  but  all,  not  any  one 
thing.  And  why  not?  A  poet  is  more 
revolutionary  than  any  radical.  Great 
days  they  were,  or  rather  nights,  when 
the  boy  would  bang  home  late  and  wake 
me  up  to  tell  me  what  he  had  been  and 
seen  that  day:  the  most  wonderful  thing 
in  the  world.  Yes.  Each  night  he  had 
been  and  seen  the  most  wonderful  thing 
in  the  world. 

He  wrote  some  of  those  things.  He 
became  all  of  those  things.  He  fell  head 
over  heels  in  love  with  every  single  one 
of  those  most  wonderful  things :  with 
his  job;  with  his  friends;  with  labour; 
with  girls ;  with  strikes ;  with  the  I.  W. 
W.;  with  socialism;  with  the  anarchists; 

11 


with  the  bums  in  the  Bowery ;  with  the 
theatre;  with  God  and  Man  and  Being. 
I  pulled  him  out  of  each  such  love-affair 
anxiously  at  first,  but  so  easily  and  so 
often  that  I  soon  felt  he  was  safe.  I 
thought  I  could  trust  the  next  most  won 
derful  thing  to  save  him  from  the  last 
most  wonderful  thing,  so  I  went  off  on 
a  long  journey,  to  Mexico.  So  did  Jack, 
but  Jack  went,  as  a  poet,  to  Villa,  the 
bandit,  while  I  went,  as  U.  S.  Marshal 
Reed  would  have  gone,  to  Carranza's 
side. 

I  don't  know  just  what  it  was  that 
finally  caught  and  took  the  joy  out  of 
this  poet  and  turned  him  into  a  poem. 
He  loved  a  girl,  one  girl,  but  Louise  is 
a  poet,  too,  and  a  vagabond,  or  she  was 
when  she  left  here  in  boy's  clothes  last 
summer  to  follow  Jack  to  Russia.  And 
he  loved  the  I.  W.  W.  faithfully  and  the 
Red  Left  of  the  Socialist  party,  and,  like 

12 


his  father,  he  hated  hate  and  all  that.  I 
really  think  it  was  in  the  breed.  Any 
how,  he  got  a  conviction  and  so,  the 
revolutionary  spirit  got  him.  He  became 
a  fighter;  out  for  a  cause;  a  revolutionist 
at  home  here,  and  in  Russia  a  commu 
nist.  He  didn't  smile  any  more. 

A  friend  of  his  and  of  mine,  who 
travelled  and  worked  with  Jack  in  Rus 
sia  last  summer,  said  that  Jack  was  "like 
the  other  communists  in  there :  he  was 
hard,  intolerant,  ruthless,  clinched  for 
the  fight."  I  could  see  that  Jack  had 
hurt  our  friend  who,  having  said  this, 
brooded  a  moment.  "But  then," said  his 
friend,  "I  wish  I  could  be  a  communist.** 

You  see,  in  Moscow,  in  Soviet  Rus 
sia,  where  there  are  lice  and  hunger  and 
discipline  and  death;  where  it  is  hell 
now;  they  see — even  a  non-communist 
can  see,  something  to  live  or  to  die  for. 
They  can  see  that  life  isn't  always  going 

13 


to  be  as  it  is  now.  The  future  is  coming; 
it  is  in  sight;  it  is  coming,  really  and 
truly  coming,  and  soon.  And  it  is  good. 
They  can  see  this  with  their  naked  eyes, 
common  men  can ;  I  did,  for  example. 
So,  to  a  poet,  to  a  spirit  like  Jack  Reed, 
the  communist,  death  in  Moscow  must 
have  been  the  most  wonderful  thing  in 
the  world :  a  vision  of  the  resurrec 
tion  and  the  life  of  Man. 


23-5  copies  of  this  brochure 
on  Whatman  hand-made  paper 

have  been  printed  by 

Will  Ransom  :  Maker  of  Books 

at  his  private  press 

in  the  month 

of  April 

1922 


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